Food, glorious BBC food

By chance I noticed the an interesting case of BBC related database overload. And it's in the form of recipe databases. Boy, is there a lot...

bbc.co.uk/food is perhaps the most obvious one. It's licence fee funded and is where you'll find recipes related to BBC TV programmes. But not all TV programmes because they don't always have the rights.

Then there's the BBC Good Food website - that's commercial, is owned by BBC Worldwide and is linked to BBC Good Food magazine, and it's various offshots. The magazine often includes recipes taken from celebrity chef books, where the books are based on BBC TV programmes. The website doesn't seem to from what I can tell. The website also includes recipes from Olive which is also owned by BBC Worldwide.

Not BBC branded, but still with a BBC connection is UKTV Food - owned by UKTV, which is owned by BBC Worldwide and Virgin Media Television. It contains recipes from TV programmes which may have appeared on BBC television, but not, as far as I can see, those shows where the BBC has the rights to put recipes on bbc.co.uk. So Rachel's Favourite Food on bbc.co.uk gives 16 recipes, whilst on UKTV Food you'll find 91.

We're not quite finished yet because there's also BBC Food - the BBC Worldwide global TV station which is commercial and not available in the UK. Yes. They have a recipe database too.

And just for good measure, there's the Open University's Ever Wondered About Food pages as well with some more, for good measure. Ever Wondered About Food is a BBC production for the OU.

Just think of the recipes that various bits of the BBC own or licence in various ways� Just think how amazing that would be if it was all joined together� UKTV Food has more than 10,000 recipes in its database alone - goodness knows what's in the others. True there would be some duplication, but wow, what a collection.

Of course it won't happen, for good reasons - rights implications, seperation of licence fee funded content from commercially funded content etc and all that jazz.

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Harry Crossley said:

We are getting a bit cheesed off with the poor hygiene displayed on cookery programmes (I'm thinking here among others, saturday kitchen.) Cooks should not be cooking in ordinary going-out clothing; we see so many instances of baggy sleeves and cuffs dragging in the food, cooks licking their fingers even! What is nicer than a chef in pristine whites...they look like chefs. It seems that these cooks these days have a jumped-up inflated idea of themselves. Television has turned them into so-called celebrities!! Not more slebs, hateful word.

Posted on 22 October 2008 at 10:29 AM

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Oh, hello. I'm Andrew Bowden and I live in London and witter on about all sorts of stuff including beer, computers, general geekery and the odd bit about IPTV and product management. That's cos I'm an IPTV expert and technical product manager/business analyst kind of thing.

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